1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an image processing apparatus and image processing method for performing image processing on a photographic image of a face.
2. Description of the Related Art
In makeup simulation or the like using a photographic image of a face, eyelashes may be distracting. To address this issue, there are techniques of removing eyelashes from a photographic image of a face (hereinafter referred to as “face image”) (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication Nos. 2011-8643 and 2011-115460).
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-8643 describes a technique of displaying a face image on a touchscreen display, accepting an operation of specifying an eyelash area from a user, and deleting an image of the specified eyelash area from the face image. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-115460 describes a technique of applying dilation and erosion (morphological image processing) to a face image and removing eyelashes from the face image. With these known techniques, image processing can be performed on the face image with reduced effects of the eyelashes.
Depending on the content of image processing, for example, in the case of detecting wrinkles around eyes in a face image, there are desires to obtain an area of eyelashes (hereinafter referred to as “eyelash area”) in the face image with higher precision.
However, the technique described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-8643 requires a user to specify the area while viewing the face image, and thus much time and effort is taken to obtain the eyelash area with high precision. The technique described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-115460 removes eyelashes and does not remove an eyelash area. Accordingly, techniques capable of easily identifying an eyelash area in a face image with high precision are needed.